This collection aims to think critically about agency and explore the relationship between agency and coercion in greater depth. In academic, activist, and policy circles alike, feminist work has re-focused attention onto women as agents rather than as passive victims of overwhelming structures of male institutional power, or less capable of exercising agency by virtue of their class, race, gender or culture. These broadly positive moves are not without risks. Most notably, they can encourage a triumphalist disregard for constraints through an exclusive emphasis on 'discovering' agency even in the least favourable situations, thereby obscuring domination, inequality, and subordination. So how does bringing agency and coercion into closer interplay impact our understanding of the two? How might the stories of feminist agency change if we locate agency and coercion on the same intellectual frame? What would it mean to disrupt the existing constellation of ideas accompanying agency so as to include coercion, subordination and oppression alongside ideas of freedom, autonomy, and independence? How do we theoretically negotiate agency and coercion in conditions of deep inequality? This collection thinks through these questions in a range of regional, intellectual, ethical and political contexts.

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SUMI MADHOK is Lecturer in Transnational Gender Studies at the London School of Economics, UK. ANNE PHILLIPS is Professor of Political and Gender Theory at the London School of Economics, UK. Her previous publications include Multiculturalism without Culture (2007), Which Equalities Matter? (1999), The Politics of Presence (1995), and Engendering Democracy (1991). KALPANA WILSON is LSE Fellow in Transnational Gender Studies at the London School of Economics, UK.

SAMANTHA ASHENDEN Senior Lecturer in Sociology in the Department of Politics at Birkbeck College, University of London, UKNGAIRE DONAGHUE Associate Professor of Social Psychology in the School of Psychology at Murdoch University, Western Australia, AustraliaMARY EVANS Centennial Professor at the London School of Economics, UKROSALIND GILL Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at King's College London, UKCLARE HEMMINGS Professor of Gender Studies and Gender Theory at the London School of Economics, UKMARSHA HENRY Lecturer in Gender, Development and Globalisation at the London School of Economics, UKKIMBERLY HUTCHINGS Professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics, UKEMILY JACKSON Professor of Law at the London School of Economics, UKAMAL TREACHER KABESH Associate Professor in the School of Sociology and Social Policy, University of Nottingham, UKLOIS MCNAY Professor of Political Theory at Oxford University, UKSADIE WEARING Lecturer in Gender, Media and Culture at the London School of Economics, UKHEATHER WIDDOWS Professor of Global Ethics in the Department of Philosophy, University of Birmingham, UK